conspicuous crusading

While the motivations of the movement for more diverse voices in young adult fiction is commendable—YA fiction, like many other areas of publishing, has its fair share of access problems with regard to class and race—the manifestation of this impulse on social media has been nothing short of cannibalistic. The Twitter community surrounding the genre, one in which authors, editors, agents, and adult readers and reviewers outnumber youthful readers, has become a cesspool of toxicity.

“Young-adult books are being targeted in intense social media callouts, draggings, and pile-ons—sometimes before anybody’s even read them,” Vulture’s Kat Rosenfield wrote in the definitive must-read piece on this strange and angry internet community. The call-outs, draggings, and pile-ons almost always involve claims that books are insensitive with regard to their treatment of some marginalized group, and the specific charges, as Rosenfield showed convincingly, often don’t seem to warrant the blowups they spark—when they make any sense at all.

It often seems like the web consists of nothing but dispiriting stories like this. You could set your watch by the tumbrils as they trundle past each day, carrying a new batch of thought-criminals to the guillotine. On the bright side, though, it’s been years since I’ve seen one of those insipid articles claiming that reading literature makes one a better person and contributes to moral progress. (Speaking of fiction, it would be nice if critics like Singal could stop pretending that the motivations are “commendable” and somehow unrelated to their utterly predictable manifestations, but I suppose that’s just my undying optimism shining through.)

Let’s be clear about what is happening here. When Wagner accuses Bari Weiss and company of writing their apology tweets and correction letters in order to signal thoughtfulness and moderation, she is excusing herself from any need to actually engage with Weiss et. al. The same is true for most of the “virtue signalling” critiques lobbed at the left: to label an argument a virtue signal is to discredit it without actually having to respond to it. Why would you respond to it? The signaler is not arguing, but maneuvering. Their words are not written in good faith. Their appeals to reason are merely a clever gloss for strategic, self-serving behavior. Reason is a vain pursuit in a world where all reasoning is a slave of narrow self-interest.

As a rhetorical strategy this is extremely effective. This is why we have seen it spread from the right’s ideological fringes, to the centerpiece of conservative critique, and now to leftist attacks on the center. But there are consequences for intellectual life dominated by a theory that no person’s words mean what they say they mean. When words have been reduced to a mask for status seeking, signalling worth, dog whistling, securing privileged interests, solidifying tribal identities, or what have you, then words have been reduced to mere tools in a competition for domination. It is foolish to think they will not be treated as such.

This is a good post. I’ve been chewing on it for a week now. And while it’s always useful to be reminded of the need to be charitable toward intellectual opponents, I’m not entirely convinced by his argument that accusations of “virtue-signaling” are equivalent to the Marxist notion of false consciousness and equally destructive to reasonable debate. Primarily, this is because, for Marx and his doctrinaire followers, class was an immutable, objective characteristic as determined by scientific analysis. Your interests as a bourgeois or a proletarian were defined by class identity, not personal choice or idiosyncrasy. The borders of identity, like the eventual physical borders of Marxist countries, were closed.

In contrast, virtue-signaling is about the effortless and cost-free demonstration of one’s place on the “right side of history.” It’s about individuals striving to keep up with an ever-changing definition of radical chic. The definition of chic is fluid, not fixed, and today’s cool kids are tomorrow’s lame embarrassments. As Kristian Niemietz observed, why does one pundit receive fawning praise for proudly proclaiming herself a communist on TV, while a student group is considered to have committed a faux pas by specifically praising Stalin’s Gulag? If a communist is a communist, how else can one explain this without recourse to the vagaries of fashion? What are people responding to if not the style in which the sentiment is expressed? To accuse Ash Sarkar of virtue-signaling isn’t to say that she “doesn’t truly believe” she’s a communist; it’s to accuse her of using the term aspirationally while not taking it seriously. She’s wrong for thinking that communism can somehow be separated from its history, and she’s contemptible for flirting with it, but no one is claiming that it’s objectively impossible for her to do so because she’s a media figure and not a factory worker.

The modern version of Marxist false consciousness appears in the form of identity politics, where your ideas and interests are assumed to be determined by your race, class, gender, etc., and you are treated as an interchangeable widget in a demographic category. Virtue-signaling, however, describes a frivolous space where ideas and words are little more than brand logos, separate from their real-world consequences. No personal epiphany or act of will could ever allow a bourgeois shopkeeper, let alone an aristocrat, to become a proletarian. No heterosexual white man can ever be truly woke, no matter how often he flagellates himself for his privilege. By contrast, accusations of virtue-signaling are intended to embarrass their targets into recognizing their hypocritical superficiality and changing their behavior. “Pardon me, but your social-climbing slip is showing.”

If Aristotle was correct that virtue is the mean between two vices, virtue-signaling denotes a lazy attempt to claim the benefits of virtue without doing the work or paying the costs. Russell Brand, the imbecilic British celebrity, is virtue-signaling when he writes a book advocating for some vaguely-defined revolution while giving interviews in which he melodramatically proclaims his willingness to die for the cause. He wants the gravitas of a savior or a martyr, but he isn’t about to seriously inconvenience himself to attain it. Should he actually move to Venezuela and become a guerrilla fighter in an attempt to preserve the dying embers of Chavismo, though, well, he would still be a contemptible idiot, but at least he couldn’t be accused of only caring about looking cool among his celebrity-entertainer peers.

To reiterate what I said years ago, to get any profitable use out of the term, I think it’s best to understand it as being specific to social media. As Greer notes, the behavior of trying to project and manipulate a certain image of oneself has always been around, but the thing we call “virtue-signaling” emerged from a specific context. It’s built on the recognition that social media has created a cultural space for the expression of opinion with a low barrier to entry. We thought talk was cheap until we invented tweeting. Now, any idiot with a smartphone can participate in a worldwide hashtag conversation. The value of having edgy political opinions has plummeted. How does one distinguish oneself in a flooded marketplace? As with all fashions, the distinctions will seem irrational to an outsider. Why is this hemline in but that one is out? Why is it cool to say “I’m literally a communist!” but gauche to say “Actually, the Gulag wasn’t that bad”? The distinction has to seem arbitrary; if it were logical and predictable, anybody could crack the code and appear cutting-edge. And the performance of virtue has to become more creative to stand out. Anybody can feel bad about injustice, but only a select few can wear that look well and receive praise for it.

Greer is concerned that when we lose the ability to argue under the assumption of your opponent’s good faith, we’re on a slippery slope to using force to resolve our differences. I do take the possibility seriously, but as I said, I’m skeptical that this is where we’re headed. I think that with social media, we’ve created a space for people to indulge en masse in fantasy. To me, Sayre’s Law describes the teacup-tempests of our social-media age — the rhetoric is so vicious because the stakes are so small. I don’t think that many people truly believe in the possibility of radical political change, let alone desire it. I think both the tiki-torch Nazis and the Antifa goons still expect their Amazon Prime deliveries to be waiting on the doorsteps of their suburban homes after they’re done brawling downtown. I don’t think any of the media figures caterwauling about fascism honestly expect to have secret police kicking in their doors. Everyone takes for granted the stability of the political system, which allows them to waste their time on romantic fantasies of redemptive violence and heroism. Lord knows there are plenty of pathologies to diagnose in the body politic, but I don’t think this particular concept is one of them.

Instead, the Sterling affair has been blown up into a political football to be used in the favourite game of British snobs: giving all common football fans a kicking as racist thugs, sticking the boot into the tabloid press for allegedly stoking prejudice and violence, and demanding stricter policing of both. Behind all that lurks the fashionable belief that working-class Brexit supporters are a bigoted mob.

Cometh the hour, cometh the Spiked article about the snobbish Elites looking down upon the People with fear and contempt. Spiked, the stopped clock of online magazines, has found its twice-daily occasion to be correct. (It’s even more touching that Hume, a torch-carrying Trotskyist, should finally have the chance to be right about something for a change.) For those blissfully unaware, during the Chelsea/Manchester City match a couple weeks ago, the television cameras caught several Chelsea fans shouting abuse at City winger Raheem Sterling as he went behind the goal to retrieve the ball for a corner kick. Thousands of amateur lip-readers quickly formed a consensus that one fan in particular had called Sterling a “fucking black cunt.” (American readers may or may not be aware that the dreaded c-word doesn’t carry the same offensive gendered connotations among our British friends; the outrage was over the modifier.)

This sparked a great National Conversation about the specter of racism in football. The Daily Mail, which never saw a barrel-bottom it wouldn’t lick for clicks, helpfully published the scoundrel’s name, age, and address, with a bonus picture of his house, no doubt to facilitate healing conversations between him and well-wishers in the community, and later gleefully snickered at his “having a moan” over losing both his job and lifelong season tickets. The Guardian, which responds to a hint of social injustice the way a flaccid male member responds to a dose of Viagra, temporarily eased its attempts to proselytize for women’s football in order to testify to the omnipresent menace of racism. Nike, fresh from sponsoring Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling rebellion, quickly bolstered its own woke credibility by producing an ad with Sterling. The media spotlight attracted plenty of other people looking to insert themselves into the story somehow. Inevitably, we were reminded that racism is always and forever everywhere, even, or especially, when it doesn’t seem to be anywhere.

Lost in all the furor and soul-searching was the villain’s insistence that he had called Sterling a cunt of the Manc variety, not the black one. (I assume residents of Manchester don’t yet qualify as a protected species under hate-crime laws.) There seems to be a question-begging circularity to the whole spectacle — how do we know he didn’t, in fact, say “Manc” instead of “black”? The shape of one’s mouth appears plausibly similar in both instances, and unless Britain’s CCTV surveillance has gotten even more quasi-totalitarian in recent years, I’m pretty sure we don’t have conclusive video analysis of how, precisely, the blackguard’s tongue was pressed to his teeth in order to form his consonants. The answer seems to be, well, wouldn’t you expect a racist to feign innocence like that? A cynic might suspect that we’ve invested too much in the story to have it all fizzle out over something as prosaic as the facts, so even if it’s not literally true in this instance, it’s generally true that there are racists out there who would say such things, so we should testify to that higher truth anyway. Besides, who would say that there’s anything wrong with a mass revival denouncing racism? I think you know who.

All in all, there’s no redeeming moral to the story. It’s just a sordid spectacle that makes a misanthrope out of the observer. But yes, when the man’s right, the man’s right. This was largely a solidarity-building exercise for a familiar type of pious liberal for whom the threat of racism would have to be invented if it couldn’t be found already existing. Like war games on the cultural level, it’s an opportunity to rehearse maneuvers and test weaponry. But if there’s one thing British sports journalists love more than sermonizing, it’s reveling in drama surrounding Jose Mourinho, and a merciful God delivered just that opportunity this week by having Mourinho finally get fired as Manchester United manager, thus sparing us from further ritual penance.

This is what the left in this country has been reduced to — online metal-detectorists searching the internet for material they can pretend to be shocked by. Sir Roger Scruton is one of the great intellects of our age and these commissars of political correctness aren’t fit to tie his boots.

Scruton’s official statement is correct but unfortunately irrelevant, as the truth usually is in these manufactured dramas. His real crime is to have been appointed to a government commission on housing due to his expertise on architecture. Anodyne enough, you might think, but his opponents consider influential positions within government and media to be their territory by birthright, and are thus outraged by this defilement. The idea that MPs in a party led by Jeremy Corbyn are appalled by anti-Semitism is too brazen to even be funny. As Theodore Dalrymple noted, the entire purpose of such propaganda is to demonstrate their contempt for the audience in a menacing way. Yes, we’re lying to your face. Are you going to do anything about it? We didn’t think so. It’s a bitter irony that a man who did so much at great personal risk to help undermine tyranny by establishing underground academic networks in Eastern Europe in the 1980s should find himself facing a similar dynamic at home.

Now that we’ve opened the door for ordinary users, politicians, ex-security-state creeps, foreign governments and companies like Raytheon to influence the removal of content, the future is obvious: an endless merry-go-round of political tattling, in which each tribe will push for bans of political enemies.

In about 10 minutes, someone will start arguing that Alex Jones is not so different from, say, millennial conservative Ben Shapiro, and demand his removal. That will be followed by calls from furious conservatives to wipe out the Torch Network or Anti-Fascist News, with Jacobin on the way.

This is the nuance people are missing. It’s not that people like Jones shouldn’t be punished; it’s the means of punishment that has changed radically.

Under the new manorialism of our age, it’s moral authority and consensus which have splintered and withered, rather than political authority. The centralized state grows ever larger and more invasive with the help of technology, but the ability of citizens to communicate and informally settle their disputes inversely shrinks. Through laziness, cowardice, and general stupidity, we’ve abdicated our responsibility to order ourselves from within our social relationships, and have thus resigned ourselves to being governed from without by employers, bureaucrats, and corporate moguls. We’re content to be granted a steady job and a small plot of social-media turf to tend; whatever useful data we produce there is handed over to our lords, and occasionally we may be called upon to march off to battle with petitions and disingenuous boycotts against hostile media territories. In contrast to the previous era of manorialism, though, our corporate lords are not bound by any restraints or obligations regarding us. Your service on behalf of your liege will not protect you should a mob target your job or public reputation. There is no manor court system to grant any rudimentary protection.

It’s further evidence, perhaps, of Campbell and Manning’s argument that we are transforming from a culture of dignity to a culture of victimhood, where pride in one’s self-sufficiency gives way to toadying and currying favor with powerful authorities in the hope of convincing them to extract petty vengeance on our behalf. Additionally, it’s also perhaps further confirmation of a related theme Philip K. Howard developed over a pair of books, that responsibility and judgment decay as a legalistic bureaucratic culture grows. As we focus increasingly on individual rights to the exclusion of questions of responsibility, the imperative becomes covering one’s ass and looking for any legal loophole that can be cynically exploited. Sure, you have the right to declare personal economic embargoes against anyone for whatever vindictive reason you wish. Certainly, when you’re determined to parse it closely enough, no one has a right to a particular job or platform. The question, as always, is whether or not the purported cure is worse than the disease, or, more importantly, whether empowering faceless corporate entities to exercise judgment on our behalf will turn out to be far more costly than we expected. In the new manorial landscape we’re cheerfully creating, where only the independently wealthy can speak their minds or act without fear of crippling social sanctions, whom do you expect to thrive? To ask the question is to answer it.

John McWhorter wasn’t correct enough — it’s not just anti-racism; wokeness itself is a surrogate religion (hence “The Great Awokening”). Now we’ve even got the arcane dietary restrictions: no appropriating certain types of cuisines, no eating certain foods during holy festivals. At least Christianity, in theory if not always in practice, emphasizes that whole “judge not” ideal. With these fanatics, there’s no such restraint.

This is a formula to kill artistic freedom – yes even by artists we may find deplorable, like R. Kelly or Kill, Baby, Kill. Every artist should take a step back at who Spotify is entrusting to carry out its new content policing.

Furthermore, modern artists should go to YouTube and dig up the footage of Frank Zappa and Dee Snyder testifying in front of Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center in 1985. If Spotify continues down this path, then artists need to realize they have the power to make Spotify suffer the same fate as the Tipper Gore group – an extinct laughingstock and stain on the history of free expression through music.

If you’re just joining us, we’re reading an article on Fox News’s website defending freedom of expression in…uh…popular music against new demands for censorship from…um…religious fundamentalists, a.k.a. rainbow-haired, pussyhat-wearing feminists, who are being supported, at least implicitly, by milquetoast liberals who see nothing wrong with organized pressure campaigns by moralistic zealots attempting to create obstacles between artists and willing audiences since only government can officially “censor” anyone. Well, the neo-Whigs who think that “It’s the current year!” counts as a persuasive argument will have fun making sense of this one, at least.

If there’s any reactionaries out there who can write a decent melody, the stage couldn’t be more perfectly set for you to position yourself as the newest phase in rock ‘n’ roll rebellion by giving this generation of church ladies the middle fingers and mockery they’re begging for. And best of all, they’ll give you all the free advertising you can handle. They won’t be able to help themselves.

It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be.

…He said that with some pride, but he has the misgivings about disengaging from political life that you have, by now, surely been shouting at him as you read. “The first several months of this thing, I didn’t feel all that great about it,” he said. “It makes me a crappy citizen. It’s the ostrich head-in-the-sand approach to political outcomes you disagree with.”

It seems obvious to say, but to avoid current affairs is in some ways a luxury that many people, like, for example, immigrants worried about deportation, cannot afford.

The Lady of the House has a business acquaintance with whom she keeps in intermittent touch via social media. This woman — let’s call her Shelly — is, to judge by her newsletters and Facebook updates, a thoroughly unpleasant person. Each post is brimming over with typical performative spleen-venting about the sociopolitical outrage du jour, and supplemented with performative wallowing in angst/situational depression. Naturally, like all the other #resistance! nonconformist freethinkers, she looks like she was rolled off the assembly line in a social-justice shrew factory, complete with bright yarn-colored hair, hipster eyeglasses, ugly tattoos, and t-shirts emblazoned with feminist slogans. Being terrible people and known thought-criminals, the Lady and I of course laugh at each status update, treating it like a guilty-pleasure TV show. How long until this dunce finally figures out that she’s using “wokeness” as an excuse to flounder in self-inflicted misery? we keep asking after every episode.

Anyway, back to Erik Hagerman, the subject of this aghast NYT profile. This was one of the most unintentionally hilarious articles I’ve read in some time. Avoiding current affairs is a, surprise surprise, privilege! Don’t you know there are information-starved citizens in Africa who would gratefully gobble up all that social media ephemera you’re wasting? Now, to be clear, countless ordinary people live lives of prosaic local and personal concerns without ever paying the slightest attention to the dreadfully important issues of, uh, pussy hats and D.C. insider gossip, but the Times is gravely concerned because Hagerman is a former corporate executive at Nike, Walmart and Disney. It’s all well and good for hoi polloi to busy themselves with trivia and leave serious matters to their betters, but if an Important Person calls shenanigans on the whole charade of being an informed, cosmopolitan citizen, it cuts straight to the heart of the clerisy’s flattering conceit that they matter. External enemies are always necessary for maintaining the faith, but heresy corrodes it from within. We can tolerate, indeed, we require a large outgroup of proudly-ignorant Trumpenproles to define ourselves against, but if one of “us” stops performing the rituals and ablutions of being well-informed and suffers no adverse consequences, what does that say about the rest of us? Make no mistake, the fear is not that society will collapse if a small minority of citizens stop paying attention to news they can’t use, the fear is that the lack of dramatic consequences will prove the utter emptiness of this whole media-class pretense. Like Shelly, Dolnick and the clucking hens he appeals to for sympathy are deeply invested in consuming the very garbage that makes them sick, but they find that preferable to having to face their own insignificance.

Look at the list of “newsworthy events” that Dolnick lists up there. Ask yourself, how many of those have profoundly changed anything about the way you view the world? Did Parkland or the unsolved Las Vegas shootings change your views on gun control or reinforce them? Has any of the skulduggery surrounding Trump and Russia changed your political principles and allegiances or just reinforced them? When was the last time you read anything that made you stop at length to rethink your most basic attitudes and commitments, if ever? For most of us, the ideological foundations of our worldviews were cemented in place long ago; all we’re doing now is laying more bricks on top of them to keep us safe and dry. None of you are going to donate money, time or energy to political causes (especially those of you who are too busy tweeting to have time for anything else). None of you are going to do anything other than vote for the same political party you’ve always voted for, no matter how they perform. Go ahead, read a few more articles about subjects you only half-understand and can’t meaningfully act upon anyway. Send a few more vituperative tweets and posts into the void to convince yourself that you’re “doing something.” Alternatively, you could get over yourself and go focus on something that makes you feel pleasant for a change. Quietly tending to your own garden would do far more to make the world a better place than sharing your ill-informed, dyspeptic tirades with the rest of us. But you’d rather have attention and adrenaline rushes, wouldn’t you?

You doubtless recollect these papers. Here they are. Everything is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view; the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I sickened as I read. “Hateful day when I received life!” I exclaimed in agony. “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust?…Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?”

— The Creature, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

People are staring to figure out that Richard Spencer has more profiles in major media outlets than he has dedicated followers. https://t.co/WCJ16OLnaw

Some of us figured that out a long time ago, not that it was particularly difficult. And while I find it funny to imply Spencer being the anguished Creature raging against his creators in the media, in actuality, I’m sure he’s delighted with all they’ve done to help. The anger should be ours, rather. Never forget that these irresponsible morons, these superficial dilettantes posing as journalists, these historical illiterates with their ridiculously self-indulgent “democracy dies in darkness!!!” masturbatory emo hysterics, did their best for the last couple of years to inflate an American “Nazi” movement, which would struggle to fill one small concert venue with all its members combined, into the great Confrontation With Evil of our time. And why? Out of boredom? Out of a need to meet a word count? Out of the pathetic yearning of a bunch of soft, redundant weaklings to participate in something exciting, dangerous, and historically significant? From established mainstream media down to partisan clickwhore sites run by gum-popping adolescents, they all played their role, and they all deserve undying contempt.

These folks plan to form a coalition of Buddhists all across America to implement the kind of social and political action they believe is right. Greg Snyder said, “Then those local movements can connect to each other and create a national movement. I would like to see a coalition come out of this. If something like that were to happen nationally, it would be an important move for the moral authority of the religious community, generally. The Buddhist voice is important.”

So, the Moral Majority gets replaced by the Moral Authorities.

The Great Awokening of the last several years has inspired many fantasies of collective action for a better world, and it would seem that an updated form of Engaged Buddhism is part of that trend. But in Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture, D.T. Suzuki stressed what he saw as the amoral nature of Zen practice:

Zen has no special doctrine or philosophy with a set of concepts and intellectual formulas, except that it tries to release one from the bondage of birth and death and this by means of certain intuitive modes of understanding peculiar to itself. It is, therefore, extremely flexible to adapt itself almost to any philosophy and moral doctrine as long as its intuitive teaching is not interfered with. It may be found wedded to anarchism or fascism, communism or democracy, atheism or idealism, or a political or economic dogmatism.

Few Western practitioners would recognize Buddhism as a mere technique for achieving a certain perspective, devoid of any ethical content. A basic acceptance of the Noble Eightfold Path, along with a reasonable understanding of Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood, would seem to be inherently incompatible with politics as typically practiced in a liberal democracy, to say nothing of totalitarianism. Then again, if you were to reverse the scenario and imagine an Asian Christian who had only ever read about Christianity in books and been impressed by the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, you could also easily imagine them being shocked and appalled at how little those principles seem to matter to most Western Christians in practice. It’s likely no different in Asia, and lay, nominal Buddhists are probably just as lazy and hypocritical about their religion as we are. Whatever the case, Buddhism in America is largely becoming just another accoutrement of lifestyle leftism, another way of absorbing the whole world into our endlessly fascinating, comfortingly familiar navels. Suzuki’s perspective is, if nothing else, a salutary reminder that capital-T Truth, assuming such a thing can be approached, might reveal itself to be far more alien and amoral than we typically imagine, an eerily grinning unknown.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.